My goal is to inform potential law school students and applicants of the ugly realities of attending law school. DO NOT ATTEND UNLESS: (1) YOU GET INTO A TOP 8 LAW SCHOOL ON SCHOLARSHIP; (2) YOU GET A FULL-TUITION SCHOLARSHIP TO ATTEND; (3) YOU HAVE EMPLOYMENT AS AN ATTORNEY SECURED THROUGH A RELATIVE OR CLOSE FRIEND; OR (4) YOU ARE FULLY AWARE BEFOREHAND THAT YOUR HUGE INVESTMENT IN TIME, ENERGY, AND MONEY DOES NOT, IN ANY WAY, GUARANTEE A JOB AS AN ATTORNEY OR IN THE LEGAL INDUSTRY.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Open Letter to the Incoming, Delusional JD Class of 2016

Dear Misguided Fool,

You will soon begin orientation at your particular law school. I am sure that you felt proud, when you received your acceptance letter. At this point, you likely still view this as some great accomplishment. Hell, beating your brother in law or nephew at chess is a bigger feat.

Due to the continuing decline in the number of applications, law school pigs have lowered their already weak-ass “standards” – in order to keep up enrollment figures. On July 31, 2013, Paul Campos published an excellent blog entry entitled “Law school in America moves toward an open admissions policy.” Check out this killer opening:

“Here is the percentage of law school applicants who were admitted, over the last decade, to at least one ABA-accredited law school to which they applied, by year:

The 2013 projection is based on the relation between the total number of applicants in this cycle and the total number of matriculants in the 2013 class, assuming an 8% reduction in the total size of the national law school class relative to 2012.” [Emphasis mine]

In sum, a typical law school applicant seeking to enroll in Fall 2013 had a 43.88%higher chance of getting accepted to at least one ABA-accredited dung pit than someone seeking to enter law school in Autumn 2004, i.e. (80-55.6/55.6)*100. The figures above do not even take into account the fact that the sharpest decline in applications comes from those with the highest LSAT scores! Do you still feel that you are special, Lemming?!?!

According to the NALP Class of 2012 National Summary Report, 84.7 percent of this massive cohort was employed within nine months of graduation. Of course, this figure includes non-law positions, attorney jobs, part-time and full-time work, plus long term and temporary posts.

Overall, there were 46,364 members of the JD Class of 2012 – competing for a total of 28,567 jobs labeled “bar passage required.” Keep in mind that not all of those positions were traditional attorney openings. Note that only 45,434 graduates had their info sent to NALP. Using the entire class size, a mere 61.6% of all JDs ended up finding such legal work, i.e. 28,567/46,364. However, this figure jumps all the way up to 64.4 percent, when relying on those for whom employment status was known, i.e. 28,567/44,339.

The New Republic published senior editor Noam Schieber's brilliant piece, headlined “The Last Days of Biglaw,” on July 21, 2013. Take a look at the stinging excerpt below:

“Stable” is not the way anyone would describe a legal career today. In the past decade, twelve major firms with more than 1,000 partners between them have collapsed entirely. The surviving lawyers live in fear of suffering a similar fate, driving them to ever-more humiliating lengths to edge out rivals for business. “They were cold-calling,” says the lawyer whose firm once turned down no-name clients. And the competition isn’t just external. Partners routinely make pitches behind the backs of colleagues with ties to a client. They hoard work for themselves even when it requires the expertise of a fellow partner. They seize credit for business that younger colleagues bring in.

And then there are the indignities inflicted on new lawyers, known as associates. The odds are increasingly long that a recent law-school grad will find a job. Five years ago, during a recession, American law schools produced 43,600 graduates and 75 percent had positions as lawyers within nine months. Last year, the numbers were 46,500 and 64 percent. In addition to the emotional toll unemployment exacts, it is often financially ruinous. The average law student graduates $100,000 in debt.

Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have a job are constantly reminded of their expendability.” [Emphasis mine]

By the way, lemming: Schieber is a Rhodes Scholar who earned a Master’s degree in economics from Oxford University. Do you think - for one moment - that YOU have a better understanding of job markets than this man?!?! When Biglaw opportunities are limited, graduates from top-ranked law schools end up taking jobs that traditionally went to second tier grads, i.e. public interest, legal aid, etc.

Based on increasing tuition rates, current victims can expect to walk away owing even larger sums of student loans. Taken together, these facts should hit your gray matter with force. People attend “professional” school, because they want to enter a secure career – and make a solid living. Why the hell else would one willingly incur $120K-190K in total student debt? YOU need to view law school SOLELY as a financial decision, because it will affect you for several decades – if not the rest of your life. The “professors” and administrators DO NOT GIVE ONE DAMN about you or your future. In stark contrast, they are paid up front, in full – while you are left holding the bag. They need to keep getting asses in seats, in order to get their filthy hooves and paws on those federally-backed, student loan dollars.

It will be very interesting to see how many new students actually show up to the lower tier schools over the next month. It's hard to believe, but this past admissions cycle was the first full cycle in which the less dishonest employment figures were available.

You're doing a great thing here. But people are still suckers and they always will be.

If law schools posted real employment figures (not counting PT, temp, non law work or school funded shitjobs) kids would still be lining up to take the plunge. The numbers would be lower, but thousands of functional retards (with college degrees) would still line up.

Cannot agree with you more. Up until very recently the law school pigs were able to finesse employment data to lure in students. I'm willing to bet that actual enrollment (not those who were just accepted and gave seat deposits) drops again. The established internet scamblog movement coupled with the growing chorus in the mainstream media (see The New Republic's recent piece on Biglaw and articles like this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323838204578653982399152600.html) cannot go ignored by prospective students. They will see law school for the scam that it is. I'm sure most students are being advised against law school by parents/friends/relatives at this point.

My guess is that the pigs will pull out the scholarship bait-and-switch to lure in special snowflakes. They'll think they are so smart getting 25%-50% off at their TT/TTT and saving money. But then the sinister grading curve swallows you whole by the end of the year and you are paying full price. Thinking they "only have 2 more years left" they'll power through to the end, not realzing they should have cut their losses after that first year. In the meantime, to lessen the loss of money for those first-year scholarships, the pigs will just raise tuition for 2Ls and 3Ls.

Have fun wasting three years of your life, learning nothing, and ruining yourself financially so some "professor" (translation: biglaw outcast and/or crusty old dinosaur) can work three days a week and drive a bmw.

You think you're gonna go to law school and set the world on fire. You won't.

You think you're going to be top 10%. 90% of you will not.

You think you're gonna make great connections and rub shoulders with judges. You won't (unless you're in the club to begin with).

You really think you're going to make law review. Who gives a shit?

You're future is set not after first semester or 1L grades. It's set the moment you enter the school. If you go to a TT, TTT, TTTT or god forbid a fucking TTTTT (like Indiana Tech) you have no shot to earn the money necessary to pay back $200K in student loans.

Rub shoulders with Judges? Judges at the State level are never anything special. They are just other lawyers, some of them bright and some of them not so bright. Some of them were very good lawyers in their day. Others were worthless lawyers. Federal level they are generally far more competent than the state level, but not always. Additionally, at the Federal Level, with lifetime appointments, calling some of the pricks would be offensive to pricks everywhere.

Thank you for everything you have done. Blogs like this have saved many, many lives. LS is a disaster even for people with no debt and decent jobs. As the market gets more glutted, people working in law will get punished more severely, pay and benefit cuts, longer work hours, job instability, etc. No one wins in this game unless you own a PI mill or become partner in Big Law. This accounts for an extreme minority of lawyers. Even if you get Big law, you are still going to lose in the long run.

The smart people know where the money is at:

http://www.jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=51732

You cant lead a horse to water if its kicking. Let the rest of the lemmings burn as guys with GED retire at 45 with a six figure pension and benefits for life.

It'll be interesting to see what the law school pigs do once they lose their jobs. Applications are down and there are just fewer lemmings overall to admit. There's no way they can keep the current level of faculty members if they can't pay them since there are less students and hence there is less money coming in. It's a mathematical fact.

What a corrupt, immoral, filthy industry. They make money destroying the futures of unassuming young people who just want a better life for themselves by fudging employment stats and charging ridiculous tuition all the while justifying it by telling the student that they "will make it back" in law practice. It's beyond me how the pigs sleep at night.

I guess caveat emptor is alive and well in higher education. Don't worry 0L lemming, you'll learn that concept in your "Property" class.

One of the good things about the modern era is that people chart their career progress on Linkedin, which is available for public viewing. I assume law professors will do the same. I expect we'll see a lot of them trying to make it as solos.

I wouldn't be slobbering just yet over the prospect of law professors getting dumped into the cutthroat job market and having to beg for pocket change on the street corners. As has been noted, most of them have been making bank for years/decades and (if they have any money skills at all) no doubt have big fat retirement accounts they can access. Not to mention gold plated retirement plans and health benefits if they are forced out. This esp. applies to the baby boomers who are in their 50s or older. Even if they were forced out tomorrow they will cash out just before the whole house of cards collapses. Just 1%ers, all of them.

Slate published Eric Posner’s piece, “The Real Problem With Law Schools,” back on April 2, 2013. Take a look at this excerpt:

“A crisis is looming in legal education. Last month, a notable group of legal educators who call themselves the Coalition of Concerned Colleagues released a letter declaring that law schools have spewed forth more graduates than the legal market can absorb, resulting in rising unemployment among young lawyers, who cannot pay off colossal student loans. As the New York Times recently reported, applications are plummeting, and a movement is on to reduce law school educations from three to two years—advocated in the New York Times by law professor Samuel Estreicher and law dean Daniel Rodriguez. The CCC letter similarly argues that legal education should be less expensive and less uniform, which sounds fine in the abstract. But in the details, the proposed fixes will make the crisis worse than ever.

The figures are grim, and the human cost is real. Ninety-two percent of 2007 law school graduates found jobs after graduation, with 77 percent employed in a position requiring them to pass the bar. For the class of 2011 (the latest class for which there are data), the employment figure is 86 percent—with only 65 percent employed in a position that required bar passage. Preliminary employment figures for the class of 2012 are even worse. The median starting salary has declined from $72,000 in 2009 to $60,000 in 2012. A while back, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 218,800 new legal jobs would be created between 2010 and 2020. As law professor Paul Campos points out, because law schools graduate more than 40,000 students per year, those jobs should be snapped up by 2015—leaving only normal attrition and retirement spots left for the classes of 2016 to 2020. Meanwhile, tuition has increased dramatically over the last several decades. Students who graduate from law school today with $100,000 or more in debt will default on their loans if they cannot get high-paying work in the law.

The crisis could have been predicted. Demand for legal services boomed in the 1990s and 2000s. College graduates, drawn by skyrocketing pay and subsidized by government-guaranteed loans, flocked to law school in ever greater numbers. Law schools, rational market actors that they are, hiked tuition. The higher prices people were willing to pay for legal education encouraged universities to enlarge classes and open additional law schools. Not surprisingly, supply overtook demand. The mismatch is now exacerbated by the development of technological substitutes for some legal work, including online services that enable people to fill out legal forms, and a weak economy.”

Eric Posner goes on to say that government-backed loans are not to blame for the glut of attorneys, outrageous tuition rate increases, or the fact that many recent grads are drowning in debt. This rat believes in the supposed “free market.” By the way, he is the son of federal appellate pig Richard Posner. He has led a charmed life. At any rate, even this bastard notes that the U.S. lawyer job is grossly over-saturated.

Prospective and current law students have no excuse now. The information is out there in droves, via these blogs and mainstream news sources. If you cannot find these articles – or comprehend basic facts about the shrinking U.S. attorney job market - then how the hell do you plan to excel at anything involving tons of reading and research?!?!

Law schools will be starting classes during the next few weeks. Some of you reading this might have put a tuition deposit down somewhere. I'll give some advice that will help you. If you are about to go to a TT, TTT or TTTT, don't go. Even if you have a scholarship, don't go. Don't worry about the $300 or $500 or $1,000 you may have deposited. It may seem like a big deal to lose that money now, but it isn't. In a month or two, you wont miss it. You will miss the $300 or $500 or $1000 you will be paying out every month for the next decade or two or three in student loan payments if you decide to go to law school, and decide to finance your mistake with student loans.

You might be afraid that people will think you are a quitter if you decide not to go. You might think that people will be disappointed in you if you don't fulfill their dreams of you becoming a lawyer. Don't worry about that. They don't have to live your life. You do. You will be better off not having gone to law school.

My advice may sound extreme or harsh, but it is true. If you are going to a TT - TTTT, you are fucked before you even walk in the door for the first day. You will have essentially no chance of ever getting a job in biglaw or big government. You will have a difficult time getting a shitlaw job. You may even have problems getting doc review. There is a very good chance that, even after you pass the bar, you will never get a job practicing law. You may decided to become a solo. You will not know what you are doing, because law school will not teach you anything about being a lawyer, or running a business (which is what a solo firm is).

To make things worse, potential non-law employers will not hire you because of your law degree. They will wonder what is wrong with you that keeps you from making millions practicing law. They may think you will create too much risk of litigation. You will find the JD to be a big scarlet letter on your resume.

What you will get from law school is three years of pointless hide-the-ball games and elliptical blathering from professors who may have never practiced law a day in their lives. As you go through law school, you will find that law school is three semesters of content squeezed into three years.

And, no, you are not a special snowflake. You will not beat the odds. Things will not work out differently for you because of whatever unique quality you have. You are running into numbers, and the numbers are against you. Law is a shrinking field. There are way too many graduates for the number of jobs available.

So be smart and back out now before you have screwed yourself for life with an ill-advised JD.

^You can't argue with this brilliant logic. You are not special. We are all expendable. The job market doesn't give a shit how smart you are. (There are plenty of very smart unemployed people out there.)

Connections and wealth trump hard work every time. Shit, great looks usually trump hard work. If it comes down to you and a beautiful young women with legs as smooth as a baby's ass, you're not getting the job.

If it's between you and someone's kid or nephew, you never had a chance in the first place. It doesn't matter how incredibly well you did on your interview.

Don't ruin your life. Back away from orientation. And if you have to beg your old boss for your job back you go ahead and do it...now. It's only pride.

4:17PM's post serves as a great truthful jackslap to all of the Ayn Rand and Horatio Alger types that frequently post and proclaim that each and every jd/lawyer that doesn't 'make it' didn't 'work hard enough', 'network enough', etc etc. Of course all of that is nonsense , and in fact 4:17PM's post illustrates that the people who actually get the jobs often really didn't 'work and network harder'- in fact they were handed their gigs on a silver platter.

Even the top law schools are a mistake for many people. I went to law school when it was still good - no massive oversupply of lawyers - and worked in good jobs for a long time after I graduated. The last 10 years have been awful - for me and many other people I know who went to even the top law schools. Temporary work with long periods of unemployment between jobs, abrupt job losses with little or no notice, jobs that lasted under a year for those who got new jobs, many lawyers out on the street for months and years not earning a dime. The list of horrors goes on....

The employment outcomes deteriorate each year you get out from law school graduation. Law is not a career for most people, even from top schools or at the top of their classes at other law schools. It is a limited term job, and then years of unemployment and underemployment. That is true from the top 3, top 6 and top 14 law schools. It is true even if you work in superstar lawyer jobs for 10 or more years. Many lawyers get hit on the head by the oversupply of lawyers and have their careers cut short. No job, no income and a useless degree from a top law school.

Do your research. Look at alternative careers where the supply and demand are more in check than law. If you have options to do something that gives you more job security, consider them seriously.

A physician assistant who makes $110,000 a year will likely always have job- as long as he or she wants. A lawyer who starts at $160,000 in a big firm is highly likely to have his career cut short either in the short term or long term and to not be able to find work as a lawyer long before he or she can afford to retire.

Think carefully about law school - before you enroll and before you finish. And at the first sign of trouble - bad grades, no job for your 2L summer, no offer of a permanent job by the summer before third year, or you don't like it - cut your losses and do something much less expensive.

Even a blue collar job can provide a wonderful future, maybe as the owner of a successful business down the road. Likely a better future for a Harvard College grad than following the crowd to law school.

My friend is trying to get into a dental hygiene program at our local community college, and it is surprisingly selective. The school has a policy limiting its enrollment to the anticipated demand for hygienists in the area. Hundreds of students apply, but they only accept about 10 a year, because the school only expects about 10 jobs to open up a year.

Shit, police academy (in my county) only takes 15 people. Often 200 people will apply. Yet my nephew wanna be lawyer (3L) thinks he's above the typical police officer. Oh I will be their boss, I'll be a prosecutor, he exclaims. What a delusional fool. After 3 years on the force police officers in my county make 70k annually, full benefits, pension, virtually no student debt (associate degree plus summer of police academy). Which would you prefer cop or shit law lawyer?

To 7:31:And you know why the dental hygiene program at the local community college is so selective? Because tuition is so low, and the job prospects are so good, of course it would be selective. The nursing program at one local community college I know here in L.A. has a two year waiting list to get in. Yes, I'm not shitting you - two-year waiting list.

Thank you for sharing that Wall Street Journal article! This made my day! Here is the link for everyone else: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323446404579006793207527958.html

In that article the Dean of Boston University Law School openly calls law school an "industry." I love seeing these bastards sweat. Hopefully tenure is abolished and these pig boomer professors get canned.

Thank you for the link to the WSJ. However, I am unable to view the main article - either at home or work. I have also tried different web browsers. Apparently, one must register an account or buy a subscription, in order to see that piece. Would you email me a copy of the full text?

“Keep in mind that somewhere around 3% of all law school applicants have the kinds of background issues that create serious liability issues for any school that admitted them. Another 5% or so have entrance qualifications (bottom 5% LSAT scores combined with 2.1 GPAs from bad colleges) that indicate their inability to do even basic college level work, and thus make it almost certain they will not be able to pass a bar exam, not matter how much remediation they are subjected to during law school (low enough bar passage rates could affect a law school’s accreditation). In addition, the average applicant applies to eight schools (there are 202 ABA law schools at the moment), and some significant percentage of applicants will, prudently, not apply to any school below a fairly high rank.

This in effect means that over the course of the last decade, American law schools have moved from a moderately selective admissions model to a quasi-open enrollment policy. If you have a college degree, can get 35 out of 100 questions on the LSAT correct (you are likely to get 20 right by simply guessing, and each year some people rack up perfect scores — it is not, in other words, a very difficult test), and don’t seem likely to go on a shooting spree, you’ll be admitted to a genuine ABA-accredited law school.

The long-term effects of this fundamental shift on the status of the legal profession, and more important, the quality of legal services available to non-corporate people, remain to be seen.”

To the commenter who posted at 7:31 am,

Thanks for providing that story. It speaks volumes that a community college dental hygiene program is MUCH MORE SELECTIVE in its admissions process than ABA-accredited law schools. In the end, the pigs only care about money; they certainly do not have the slightest concern for their students.

If the law school cockroaches adopted stringent admissions guidelines, then MANY existing ABA diploma mills would go out of business. The “professors” and deans have an interest in keeping their jobs, so they will never agree to this approach. Yet, the jackals will continue to claim that they work for “professional” schools.

7:31 here. The community college actually did due diligence with its dental hygiene program. They studied the local market and determined that approximately 10 dental hygiene jobs open up every year in the surrounding area. They published the study on their website and announced that they would only admit 10 students per class so that all their grads would have good employment prospects (they are the only hygiene school in the region). Salaries for dental hygienists in the region are quite good as a result.

Basically, they disappoint a lot of aspiring hygienists during the admissions process before they take their money, but those who make it usually get jobs.

Law schools take students' money (or the money taxpayers lent them that they may never pay back) and then blame the students for failing after they graduate into a hyper-glutted market.

The problem with law school is not limited to first year jobs. There are not career jobs for at least half of those who get first year jobs. That means that even if you go to a relatively "safe" law school like Columbia or NYU, you have a high risk of unemployment down the road. A reasonable estimate is about 350,000 full time permanent attorney jobs for 1.5 million grads of ABA accredited law schools in the U.S., excluding solos. Thus a quarter of all law grads have jobs - not half. If half of all newbies have jobs, less than a quarter of experienced grads do, doing the math. The jobs disappear as you get older - statistically they have to based on these numbers.

Well said. True for shitlaw as well as biglaw. I have 20 years worth of experience in divorce, criminal defense and similar stuff and find myself with sub-$5k/year earnings now that the local government cut down court appointments.

Law schools had one of the easiest business models for years. Raise tuition, lecture law students in large classes for maximum revenue without doing any real legal skills training, recruit new students with deceptive employment outcomes and glossy brochures, repeat.

I was surprised to discover recently that Mr. Tokaz's primary extra-curricular activity--when not posing as a high-minded law school reformer--is running a website devoted to insulting, ridiculing, and defaming law professors, including as Prof. Diamond notes, one post calling for Diamond to be fired for having the temerity to disagree with Mr. Tokaz and other know-nothings about law schools. A class act. (Mr. Tokaz also uses the moniker BL1Y when posting his harassment and abuse of law faculty.)

UPDATE: In response to a reader query: you can reach Mr. Tokaz at derek.m.tokaz@gmail.com. He seems to respond to being called out on false statements of fact, which is one of his specialties.

Don't be fooled; these scammers are on the ropes but not down for the count. As we quickly approach open admissions for law school applicants, you can count on this: if they can figure out a way to do it-and keep their cushy jobs-these scammers will find a way to accept 110% of applicants. Hey, if they've got federally guaranteed loans, why not accept some of 'em twice?

The law schools are run by devils. Look at the names. I'll bet you 80% of the profs at a fucking minimum came from upper middle class families. They did well in law school because they were familiar (fluent really) in the bullshit jargon and style of writing.

They had connections. They went to the best public and private schools growing up. Or boarding schools. They had tutors if they needed them. Mommy and daddy gave them a sense of entitlement. ('Jason, honey, ask the doctor about the moles on your armpits. It's okay to talk to him or cut him off if you've got something important to say.') They went to the best colleges.

I didn't see anything hateful in those remarks. Devils is generally a harsh term, but look at the THOUSANDS of people that these rats have collectively ruined. You seem to be hypersensitive to anyone pointing out the ethnic composition of the professoriate. For instance, you did not get offended that someone alluded to the social class of these academics.

http://www.jlaw.com/Commentary/racialpolitics.html

Check out this "Jewish Law" commentary/ reproduction of Eugene Volokh's piece, which appeared in the October 12, 1998 edition of the Wall Street Journal. Volokh is a “law professor” at UCLA. The article is labeled "Racial Politics at the Supreme Court." Review the brief segment below:

"Ethnic groups don't distribute themselves evenly throughout the workforce. Asians occupy more than 40% of the freshman class at the University of California at Berkeley. Jews, 2% of the full- time working population, make up 26% of the nation's law professors. Jews also tend to make up about 30% of the Supreme Court clerks, which means non-Jewish whites are underrepresented among the clerks compared to the population at large."

That was written in 1998. Those figures may be higher now, but I truly don’t care. Hell, the current Supremes roster includes six members of the corporation known as the Roman Catholic Church – and three Jewish people. Does that reflect the religious makeup of the nation? In the penultimate paragraph, Volokh states that he is Jewish:

“One could, of course, argue that the court should prefer applicants of certain races even if they are somewhat less qualified than their competitors of other races, because this would add "diversity" or be more "representative." But should the Supreme Court really start discriminating against more qualified clerkship applicants simply because of the color of their skins? What's more, as a Jew, I'm troubled that a serious attempt at ethnic balancing would require that there be at most one Jewish clerk every year, rather than the current average of about 10. While no one is suggesting such limits now, this is where the logic of seeking a clerkship cadre that "looks like America" would lead.”

Are you going to get upset with Volokh or the Wall Street Journal for publishing those comments? By the way, the site appears to be operated by a Jewish man. This is not garbage from Stormfront.

If you want to rant about the pathetic, awful law schools, please avoid mentioning the racial or ethnic component of the academic thieves – so that you don’t offend pussies such as 5:05 am. Although, I am sure he does not mind the comments regarding WASP “professors.” Seriously, you can make your point without resorting to those measures.

Bravo Nando. That was an intelligent way to handle that sensitive whinner. "Jews, 2% of the full- time working population, make up 26% of the nation's law professors. Jews also tend to make up about 30% of the Supreme Court clerks, " and 33% of the supreme court. Seems like disproportional participation in the law $chool $cam.

Good point. I was actually a little annoyed by the introduction of race into the discussion until you pointed out the stats. Such a glaring over-representation of particular groups undercuts law professors' alleged commitment to diversity. Obviously, they are only concerned about making sure the class of JD debt-slaves is diverse, but not the class of aristocratic law profs.

On August 10, 2013, the Forgotten Attorney posted a hilarious and ass-kicking entry entitled “If I Don’t Go To Law School, What Else Am I Going To Do?” Check out the following excerpt:

"Unfortunately, this post is long overdue. If you are going to law school, I’m sure you have already mailed in your tuition deposit, signed a lease on your apartment and incurred other expenses. Not to mention spending money on LSATs, campus tours, admission consultants. But it is still not too late from backing out from a potentially bad decision. Several thousand dollars in sunk costs can be easily overcome except for the most destitute.

Now that lawyer-wannabes are starting to learn the truth about the pathetic financial outcomes of most new and mid-career lawyers, they are starting to have second thoughts. I’m certain that they know that as a member of the Class of 2016, they are presumed to be dumbasses unless proven otherwise. But they have to face the difficult question: “What else am I going to do with my life?”

Let’s keep it real – a lot some of you never wanted to be lawyers – you were in it for the money. You applied because your political science degree kept you out of most science and business track careers. Your only options were a low-paying retail job or a commission only sales or insurance job that was available to a high school dropout. Some of you may have attended decent colleges and need to meet your parents’ and friends’ expectations. To make things worse, unemployment rates for young people and older, recent college graduates are high with fewer older people retiring. You had nowhere else to go."

Later on, the author continued his assault:

“You think you’re someone special. In three years, you think the recession will pass. You think employers will line up wanting to wine and dine you like Mitch McDeere in the beginning of John Grisham’s The Firm. In the book, Mitch graduated third in his class at Harvard Law School. You’ll do the same thing, right?

Now it’s August and you’re set to attend orientation at your shitty law school (a.k.a. Top 30 or below, top regional, top ranked in environmental international food law) after deciding between your acceptance letters from Garbage Law School, Hamburger University School of Law, Infilaw and Cooley. You’ve read this blog and others telling you about what a risky and stupid decision you’re making. You’ve read the “Vale of Tears” that chronicle the losers that are jobless after graduation with $150,000 in debt. But you’re going anyway because you got a $5,000 tuition discount and an alumni who was your father’s best friend’s cigar buddy who practices ambulance chaser law “promised” you a job during a drunk night out on the town.”

If you could use a good laugh, and you appreciate insight into this GLUTTED field, then you should read the entire entry.

"You applied because your political science degree kept you out of most science and business track careers. Your only options were a low-paying retail job or a commission only sales or insurance job that was available to a high school dropout." Yes, but why do people get a political science degree in the first place? To go to law school. People with political science degrees usually want to go to law school since the end of high school. People that switch to law upon undergrad graduation are usually English, history, journalism, theology, philosophy majors (what a bunch of useless degrees). But the realities of the poli sci degree, as he describes them, are quite accurate. Poli sci degrees won't even get you paralegal jobs. Those jobs want an additional paralegal certification that lasts a year. And most paralegal job openings require extensive exp. And have fun trying to get a govt job with a poli sci degree. That's a joke. The gov't wants to hire people with useful skills such as critical need foreign languages. Besides the perference ALWAYS goes to veterans. So if you didn't serve, you don't know foreign languages, and your not eligible for affirmative action...youre unlikely to get in. Poli sci is a miserable major that should be discontinued.

It's strange that law School doesn't have prerequisties. Med school does, so does pharmacy, dental, so on.

As a start, all law schools which are not part of an accredited university should be shut down, and this includes Brooklyn "Law School".

Imagine if there were tiny little-known independent "medical schools" like there are in the law school world.

Imagine "Golden Gate School of Medicine", "Hippocrates School of Medicine", "Dr. Jonas Salk College of Medicine", "Florida Coastal School of Medicine and Surgery", "Brooklyn Medical School"...

You get the picture. The public would never trust graduates of independent hole-in-the-wall sham medical schools.

Then why does the public trust grads of "Thomas Jefferson School of Law", "Brooklyn Law School", etc.?

I would be ashamed to even attend such a school.

I may have gone to a Second Tier law school, it may be ranked in the 60s nationwide, but at least it's part of a "name" university which is sought-after by undergraduate students, has fraternities and sororities, sports teams, a nursing school, a school of social work, grants MAs and PhDs, and has a REAL university campus with dorms, an undergraduate library and cute undergrad girls...

Independent law schools are a total embarrassment because when you attend one, you are essentially admitting to yourself and to the world that "I'm such a failure, I have to attend a law school that doesn't even have a university attached to it." And you have to admit this failure from Day One, before you even graduate.

Frankly, these people are complete suckers and are beyond help, beyond pity and beyond remorse.

It boils down to this. If you don't attend a law school in the Top 5-6, and if you don't make Law Review and/or Order of the Coif wherever you do end up going, and if you don't have family or other connections which are a mortal lock, then you'll probably get a job coming out of law school, but it'll be a "shitlaw" job and your salary will be something like $45,000, $55-60K absolute tops, AND you'll find it very hard to build upon that for the first 2-3 years or so. That's the nature of the legal job market today, and it ain't gonna change anytime soon. Just try living and paying off your ridiculous debt with that kind of salary.

Did anyone every see that study showing how bartenders and steak house waiters in downtown manhattan make more than the average I-banker and lawyer? I think it was in Forbes. Professions that don't even require a high school diploma, loads of debt, and years of your life wasted "studying" where you make more than some financial/legal professionals. Plus, you just work your shift and go home. Of course, these aren't "prestigious" enough professions for Jack Knorps and the lemmings who keep the law school pigs well fed.

The world changed dramatically since boomer time, yet people keep chasing that dead dream.

College is a waste. If you become a liberal artist or major in business, you will serve coffees outright. If you major in STEM, you will be outsourced or insourced and then you will serve coffees. Yet, at least you arent totally screwed like if you become a lawyer.

I keep on harping on that the key to success now is political protection and/or doing something no one ever though of. You dont grow up thinking you want to be a steak house waiter, but that's where the money is at. That will give you a far better off life than college and especially law school. (The same goes for cop, fireman, unionized labor in the big cities, etc.)

It's the whole credential inflation thing. I met a friend of a friend the other day who has a bachelor's in organizational management or some such and can't find a job making much more than minimum wage. He is mystified as to why employers want both a college degree and experience for a job that might pay 10-12 bucks an hour.

I tried to explain that everyone has a BS these days so it really doesn't mean much--like a high school diploma in the old days. He didn't really grasp that, I suppose b/c of all the cultural brainwashing about higher ed.

“When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

This article was printed two years and five months ago. Do you think that the programmers have not made greater strides in developing the software and technology, since that time?!?!

Later on, the author noted the following:

“David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Even when the economy does recover, MANY HUNDREDEDS OF THOUSANDS of good jobs will not return. Business owners and corporate pigs are not going to decide to shell out more money, so that they can rehire trained professionals - when they can rely on cheaper, accurate technology. If you choose to ignore these warnings, then don’t come crying in three years - when you are working at Starbucks, while owing $140K in NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt.

I'm not sure if this is the same insulting and offensive Volokh fellow that Nando quoted, but if it is, it is Volokh that seems to want to proclaim his religion maybe far too often. For example:

"The more likely explanation is that Yiddish is quickly supplanting Latin as the spice in American legal argot."

And here is the old article that the above quote came from. It is kind of a disheartening article (especially the kidding around about the insulting slur of "goy" which is interpreted as "mule" )for people to read if they are not Jewish, and let's just leave it at that:

In all fairness, his religion/tribal network system is probably responsible for his employment, at least getting his foot in the door. WASPs are suckers/smucks and are have too much integrity for that sort of tribalism.

CBS News MoneyWatch published a troubling article entitled "Despite stronger job growth, recovery still a long march," on July 5, 2013. The piece was written by Alain Sherter. Look at the following portion:

"Although analysts are likely to cheer the latest government jobs data as a sign the economy is gaining speed, the numbers obscure one thing: Even as parts of the U.S. economy recover in earnest, the job market remains generally flaccid. "It's stunning how long it will take to get back to a healthy job market given the status quo in the job numbers," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist with the Economic Policy Institute.

How long? Try 2020. At the current rate of job-creation, it will take roughly six years to close the gap in jobs lost during the recession that officially ended in June 2009 and the ensuing slow-mo recovery, according to the non-partisan think-tank. "There's this sense that we're improving and well on the way to recovery," she added. "But that's not what's happening on the ground."

Total nonfarm payrolls grew by 195,000 in June, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday, surpassing consensus forecasts of 165,000. The unemployment rate remained at 7.6 percent. Monthly job gains have averaged 175,000 over the last year.

The government said job-creation in May and April topped previous estimates by 20,000 and 50,000 jobs, respectively. Yet even if job growth suddenly surged to 225,000 per month, the economy still wouldn't return to full employment until early 2018, Shierholz recently calculated using Congressional Budget Office data."

This report also fails to point out that the new jobs tend to be low-wage tripe – at a time when Americans have the highest levels of education of any generation. Of course, they also are strapped down with the largest amount of NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt.

Further into the article, the author continued:

“The U.S. economy has had 10 recessions since 1948. Until 1980, it took an average of nine months after these downturns ended, and never more than a year, for employment levels to snap back to normal. Then, for reasons that aren't fully understood, things changed. After the 1990-91 recession it took nearly two years for jobs to reach their pre-bust peak. Following the dot-com crash in 2001, it took 39 months.

Following the latest recession we are now at 48 months and counting -- the economy needs to add 8.5 million jobs to make up for the ones that were lost during the downturn and to account for new people joining the labor market.”

Again, the tools at CBS “forgot” to mention that most of the new jobs pay anemic wages. Anyone with a functioning brain stem realizes that the United States has a bubble economy.

On August 30, 2012, the New York Times posted Catherine Rampell’s piece, under the headline “Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds.” Check out the excerpt below:

“While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.

“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.”

Are you starting to get a clue about the overall job market, moronic lemming?!?!

Rampell then writes:

“The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.”

Keep in mind that YOU could end up working in food preparation – or as a barista – with a goddamn law degree. Try repaying your immense student loans back on that income. If that is the case, then scratch marriage and having children off your list. What woman wants to be stuck with your broke, HEAVILY-INDEBTED ass?!?! Remember, women typically marry for security and money. Perhaps, if you resemble a young George Clooney, or you are a male model, you might end up with a decent woman – but she will likely be significantly older than you.

Make sure to read the entire article. If you think that going to law school is going to make you immune to the realities of the U.S. job market, then you truly are a cretin! A dog that crosses a crowded highway has more sense than the typical member of the JD Class of 2016.

Read Harry Dent's the Great Crash Ahead. I've never been a doomsayer, but if things are as bad for your generation as they seem to be by all of these posts, then a huge crash is almost a given. If the great consumers of tomorrow have no decent jobs, no decent wages, if they are burdened by student debt they can't pay back . . . where does that leave the country in the long run? The late great United States. Perhaps becoming an ex-patriot really is the way to go for those burdened with large amounts of debt and no decent job prospects. Our government is dysfunctional at this point. The only time the economy seems to thrive is when the military industrial complex gets us in another war, which happens every 20 years or so. I hear Vancouver is a really nice place to live. If you are young and single, why hang around here?

Nando, you tell it like it is. I'm a 3L now and do my best to talk the lemmings out of going to law school. It's worked a few times, but more often than not it doesn't.

Going to law school is by far the biggest mistake I have ever made. Even though I have a rich grandmother paying for all of it, attending is still my biggest regret. I have worked for a few lawyers over the past summers, and I don't even want to work in this scummy profession. I could not, in good conscience, recommend going to law school to anyone who doesn't plan on attending a top ten school.

What you are doing is great. You are telling the truth, but the lemmings are in their own little world and think they will be that special snowflake that makes it big. You are vilified by many, but you are doing a great service by keeping kids informed of the law school scam. I sure you have deterred many from enrolling, and I hope that number keeps getting higher.

Objective

This blog is maintained by a graduate of a third tier law school. My goal is to educate prospective law students about the perils of obtaining a legal education. There are many pitfalls - the debt load, the oversupply of lawyers, the fact that there are not enough legal jobs to satisfy nearly 45,000 annual law graduates, and the reality that the majority of law school graduates will end up with low-paying jobs upon completion of their "legal studies."